


Whatever Will Be Will Be

by Xinbimodu



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-31
Updated: 2012-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-23 01:53:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/616764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xinbimodu/pseuds/Xinbimodu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Derek Hale went away to college and came back six and a half years later with a degree in psychology (instead of one in engineering), Mr. and Mrs. Hale weren’t exactly displeased.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Whatever Will Be Will Be

**Author's Note:**

  * For [1001cranes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1001cranes/gifts).



> Happy birthday 1001cranes! Thank you for making the world a brighter place with your writing and tweets :]
> 
> Title from the song Que Sera Sera (the original version by Doris Day is my favorite).

When Derek Hale went away to college and came back six and a half years later with a degree in psychology (instead of one in engineering), Mr. and Mrs. Hale weren’t exactly displeased. They were surprised, definitely, but they couldn’t be upset when their son, always so quiet and withdrawn, had come home with a few extra letters behind his name. 

Laura didn’t care either way.

Her brother was never the same after the fire, his eyes haunted and his speech careful in a way that it hadn’t been before _she’d_ waltzed into their lives—

Derek, a sophomore at the time, had set his sights on the engineering program at Berkley, determined to get in before half his graduating class had even begun to contemplate which schools to apply for. 

Then he’d fallen in love and things had fallen apart

— Sometimes she wonders about what life would have been like if Kate had never smudged her dirty fingerprints all over the windowpane of Derek’s life, if he hadn’t exchanged his books about urban development for novels with titles like _The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat_. 

Some part of her understands. A larger part sympathizes. But for the most part she just wants him to be happy, to smile again like that excited fifteen year old boy, easy and genuine. 

***

“Why did you major in psychology?”

Is a question that Derek gets a lot the first six months that he’s back in Beacon Hills. He always smiles brightly in response, rambling on about how the human mind has always fascinated him, about how he wants to help people understand their thoughts and actions in a bid to better their future selves.

It’s not exactly the truth but if not everyone smiles and nods along to his well rehearsed spiel he pretends to be too preoccupied studying for his state and national licensing to notice. 

***

_Even in day glow orange and handcuffs she’s the most beautiful woman in the room. He shouldn’t be here, his family’s lawyer and his parents would throw a fit if they knew he was at the county jail instead of at lacrosse practice._

_His stomach, roiling angrily around his half eaten lunch, seems to agree._

_His hands are shaking when he picks up the phone on his side of the glass partition, the nails bitten to the quick. He’s terrified that she won’t pick up the phone, that she won’t acknowledge him in any way, even after he’d foolishly given her his heart and the key to destroying everything he holds near and dear. She stares at him for a moment, disdain etched across every inch of her face._

_Her heartbeat doesn’t quicken, doesn’t flutter or flip, as she picks up the phone, her eyes hard as stone and just as cold._

_“Just tell me why,” he says, voice cracking on the last word. Why pretend to love him when it’s obvious, in the secretive corners of her smirk, in the fire that burned his family’s home to the ground, in the way she’d lied, that she doesn’t?_

_He needs an explanation, needs it in order to soothe the burning guilt that keeps him awake while his sister sleeps soundly beside him on scratchy motel sheets._

_She drops the phone back onto it’s cradle, her smirk morphing into something ugly and mean as she stands and walks away, “Because I could,” ringing loud and unrepentant in his ears.  
_

***

Mrs. Marstensen, the only psychologist worth her salt in the county and a close family friend, is thinking about retiring and wants Derek to take over her practice. 

He’d love to say no to that much responsibility, to that many clients, but he’d be an idiot to refuse. He’s been out of school all of three years.

For the past two years of those years he’s worked as a stand in counselor for Miss Morel at Beacon Hills High while she’s been overseas working on her sociological research and dissertation. She’s due back before the start of the new school year though and he doesn’t have any other stateside job offerings to consider. 

The promise of his own practice is too good to pass up so he takes Mrs. Marstensen up on her offer.

He starts working at her office halfway through the summer, sitting in on counseling sessions and meeting lifelong neighbors that he knows by face, if not by name, for the first time.

The adjustment period of nine months flies by and soon, even the most skittish of patients have grown comfortable in his care. A week before his thirtieth birthday he signs all the paperwork that Mrs. Marstensen’s lawyers have drawn up, and receives a new set of keys to hang next to the ones that start his Camaro and open the front door of his sparsely furnished studio apartment.

His name on the front door of his modest office building glimmers smartly in the bright morning light and for the first time in a very long time he thinks that maybe, just maybe, this was the path he was meant to travel all along.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked what you read please don't hesitate to swing by [my tumblr](http://xinbimodu.tumblr.com/) and say hello!


End file.
